February 2010Scenes from a Krakow CafeKazimierz, the city's Jewish district, was once a place of tragedy. Now its hip cafe culture tells the story of post-communist Poland's Jewish revival. linkStory by Ruth Ellen Gruber
Photographs by Soliman Lawrence

It's a sunny morning in early July, and I'm having breakfast at an outdoor cafe table in Kazimierz, the old Jewish quarter of Krakow. I have been sitting at cafes in and around Szeroka Street, the main square of Kazimierz, for nearly 20 years, watching the paradoxical Jewish components of post-communist Poland unfold, and Kazimierz itself evolve from a deserted district of decrepit buildings—some with grooves on their doorposts from missing mezuzahs—into one of Europe's premier Jewish tourist attractions, a fashionable boom town of Jewish-style cafes, trendy pubs, kitschy souvenirs and nostalgic shtetl chic.

As Poland's historic royal capital, Krakow is one of central Europe's most beautiful cities and was one of the few major Polish metropolises to escape wholesale destruction in World War II. Once Kazimierz was a center of Jewish life and learning, but after the Holocaust only its architectural skeleton remained: Krakow's 64,000 Jews (among three million of pre-war Poland's 3.5 million Jews) perished, but seven synagogues and a score of former prayer houses, stores, homes and cemeteries survived. After the war, under the communists, Kazimierz slid into ruin, and only in the early 1990s did the neighborhood begin to take on new life. Even before Steven Spielberg came here to shoot his 1993 film Schindler's List, set in the wartime Krakow Ghetto and the city's concentration camp, Plaszow, Kazimierz was beginning to rediscover its Jewish soul.

Although Krakow is now home to just a few hundred Jews at most (Poland itself has maybe 5,000 to 15,000 out of a population of 40 million), the streets beyond my cafe are crowded with people here for the annual nine-day extravaganza known as the Festival of Jewish Culture. There are Jews from within Poland and from outside: Rabbis, tourists, earnest seekers of family history, writers, filmmakers, bureaucrats, philanthropists, academics, musicians and artists wander the square and surrounding cobbled streets. The vast majority of visitors, however, are non-Jewish Poles who have come to celebrate both the Polish Jewish life that once was and the contemporary Jewish culture that is still very much alive around the world. Some of them have helped bring about the renaissance of Kazimierz and a revival of public interest in Jewish culture throughout the country. Newcomers and regulars, Jews and non-Jews, come together at the cafes that line Szeroka and other streets and squares, turning Kazimierz into a moveable feast of drink, food and conversation that migrates from cafe table to cafe table.

I am waiting for Stanislaw and Monika Krajewski, among my oldest friends in Poland, who live in Warsaw and whom I met on the eve of Yom Kippur in 1980. Back then, I was a young American reporter, in Warsaw to cover the birth of Solidarnosc—Solidarity, the anti-communist labor movement that spawned a peaceful revolution and was the harbinger of the collapse of communism. I am not a religious Jew, and I rarely go to services. But in Warsaw, on that erev Yom Kippur, I looked for a shul. The only one to be found of what once were hundreds, was the Nozyk synagogue, built in 1902 and used by the Nazis as a stable.

In 1980, the synagogue stood dilapidated and empty. My search took me to a shabby room nearby where paint was peeling from the walls but Jews were gathered for prayers. There was no rabbi: there was not one in Poland at the time. Perhaps three dozen people, almost all men, almost all elderly, stood swaying over well-worn prayerbooks. Among them was a sprinkling of people my own age, and a couple of toddlers running about and making noise. Some of the elderly congregants shushed them—loudly—and I remember thinking, "How can you shut them up? You should encourage them; be happy that there are children here among you."

After the prayers, a young married couple came up to me, eager to know who I was and why I was there. "It's simple," I told them, "I'm an American reporter covering Solidarity; I'm Jewish; it's Yom Kippur, so I came to synagogue. It's normal." But "simple" and "normal" had different meanings in their lexicon. They came closer. "Oh, you're a real Jew!" they exclaimed. This put me on the spot. A "real Jew"? After all, I don't speak Hebrew, I don't go to synagogue, I don't keep kosher. "No," they insisted. "You're a real Jew; you've known all your life that you are Jewish. We are just learning. Come back home with us and tell us what to do."

That couple was Staszek, as Stanislaw is known, and Monika. They were among the organizers of the "Jewish Flying University," a semi-clandestine study group of Jews and non-Jews in communist Warsaw who met informally to teach themselves what they could about Judaism. This meant the rituals, customs, traditions and history but also the memories and inflections that are often innate in even the most secular of Jews who grew up in freedom.

Monika, an artist and teacher, and Staszek, a writer and professor, wend their way around tables through the cafe garden of my hotel, the Klezmer Hois, a rambling, peak-roofed building that used to house a mikvah. We greet each other with hugs. Monika, as usual, wears a flowing skirt and distinctive earrings. A deeply religious man, Staszek is active in interfaith relations and is the Poland consultant for the American Jewish Committee. His books range from commentaries on the Torah to scholarly works on mathematics and logic, his academic field, to essays on Jewish life in contemporary Poland, where every step toward the future can feel weighted down by the memory of the past.

The Krajewskis and I catch up on news, and I ask about their sons. Both children celebrated their bar mitzvahs in the Nozyk synagogue, the synagogue that was too dilapidated to be used when we first met but is now fully restored and functioning. The bar mitzvah of their younger son, in 2004, was particularly moving. Daniel, who has Down syndrome, carried the Torah, but instead of giving a speech, he showed pictures he had painted: Jacob's blessing to Joseph's sons; the burning bush; the parting of the sea; the golden calf; the breaking of the tablets. The last picture showed his entire family at the Sabbath table, a scene he has known all his life.
Other friends come by and we chat. Then Monika and Staszek are off. Both of them are giving talks or teaching workshops in the festival this year.

In a way, the struggle for the soul of Kazimierz can be seen in the differences among the cafes on Szeroka Street. Venues drawing on Krakow's Jewish history were the first to open on the square. But on Szeroka today things are different. There is an Indian restaurant and an Italian one, as well as chic new bars blaring hip hop. Still, critics love to hate Szeroka for its commercial exploitation of Jewish heritage as a saleable commodity and for what some call the "Disneylandization" of Jewish culture and tradition through an emphasis on stereotype and artifice.

The Klezmer Hois, where I often stay, is my favorite Jewish-style venue. Located at one end of Szeroka, it has the bygone coziness of an old world family parlor, with doilies and tablecloths covering mismatched tables, chairs and sofas. It was opened by my friends Wojtek and Malgosia Ornat. Though both have Jewish roots, neither was raised Jewish or with any awareness of Jewish family connections: Malgosia, a petite woman with wide eyes and short-cropped blonde hair, was 19 when she learned that her maternal grandmother was Jewish, a story that is not unusual in Poland.

Now in their 40s, the Ornats opened the first Jewish-style cafe in Kazimierz, the Ariel, in 1992. Then the only cafe on Szeroka Street, the Ariel was a lonely outpost amid a grimy wasteland of vacant lots and empty buildings. I vividly remember how Wojtek and I, sitting at an umbrella-shaded wicker table, fantasized that some day people would come. And they have. The Ariel touched a nerve that somehow connected commerce with commemoration and spearheaded the creation of a Jewish-style cafe culture which by now has spread far beyond Krakow. As the first to evoke (and capitalize on) a literary image of a lost Jewish world in their cafe decor, the Ornats' visual and atmospheric take on what is "Jewish" has been important in shaping the experience and expectations of locals and tourists, Jews and non-Jews. Like a sepia-tinted memory, "Jewish" is now a brand that symbolizes a time and place that is bygone but fondly remembered. This idea plays on nostalgia but also on the imagination: It represents what some people wish the Jewish world was really once like.

Today, half a dozen venues on Szeroka Street present a Jewish theme or make reference to Kazimierz's Jewish heritage, in their name or signs, which are sometimes written in Hebrew-style letters, or in their menus, which feature foods like gefilte fish. There's the Ester hotel and the Noah's Ark restaurant. The Crocodile Street Cafe is named for a short story by the writer Bruno Schulz, who was killed in the Holocaust. The Rubinstein hotel reflects the fact that the cosmetics queen, Helena Rubinstein, was born here. The exterior of the Once Upon a Time in Kazimierz restaurant is mocked up to look like a row of pre-war shops, with weathered-looking signs fronting the street announcing Benjamin Holcer's carpentry shop and Chajim Cohen's general store.

One reason I like Klezmer Hois is that it is low key. There is klezmer music but no kitschy curios for sale or on display, no garish commercial exploitation of a neighborhood whose Jewish population was murdered. Instead, the Ornats use the profits from the Klezmer Hois to run a Jewish publishing house, Austeria, which issues books by Polish and foreign authors. They also run a Jewish bookstore on the ground floor of one of the old Kazimierz synagogues, now used for Jewish art exhibits.

Klezmer Hois is a sharp contrast to the Ariel, which still operates on Szeroka—much expanded and under different management. With dramatic signage depicting big plaster lions flanking a giant menorah, the Ariel is the most conspicuous landmark on the square, aside from the gothic Old Synagogue, which is now a Jewish museum. Catering largely to tour groups, it sells an off-the-shelf, cookie-cutter "Jewish" experience the way a sushi bar sells Japan or a folk-style restaurant uses hokey traditional music to sell ethnicity. Dozens of paintings of rabbis cover the walls: bearded and sad-eyed, with yarmulkes and sidecurls, they read, lay tefillin, pray and count money. There are also refrigerator magnets: Stars of David, menorahs and disembodied Jewish heads, some of them with exaggerated features right out of Nazi caricature. I once asked an Ariel waiter why these were on sale. He shrugged. "They're Jewish," he replied.

For many people, tourists and locals alike, Kazimierz became a major destination with the Festival of Jewish Culture, which was founded in 1988, one year before the ouster of communist rule. By 1992 the Festival had already grown so much that some called it a "Jewish Woodstock." Performers over the years have included Theodore Bikel, Shlomo Carlebach, Chava Alberstein and the Klezmatics. One local entertainer who takes part, and whom I often see at the Klezmer Hois, is the Polish Jewish pianist Leopold Kozlowski, now nearing 90, who was the subject of the movie The Last Klezmer. Nowadays, the Festival features more than 200 concerts, lectures, art exhibits, workshops, guided tours, performances, film-showings and street happenings. Most of the events are sold out, and the final concert, called "Shalom on Szeroka," draws upwards of 15,000 people, most of them Catholic Poles.

The festival's founders were two non-Jewish intellectuals, Janusz Makuch and Krzysztof Gierat. Like many other young Poles in the waning decades of communism, Makuch and Gierat became fascinated with Jewish history and culture. Delving into the Holocaust and other Jewish topics was a means of both seeking the truth of their country's past and helping inform their own identities. Like members of the Jewish Flying University in Warsaw, they sought to fill in the blanks left by communist-era taboos that prevented an objective public analysis of history itself, including the thousand-year history of Jews in Poland.

"It was like a discovery of Atlantis that people lived here and created their own original culture and had such a deep influence on Polish culture," Makuch, who still directs the festival, once told me over coffee at the Klezmer Hois. An intense man with deep eyes, a full, dark beard and a perpetually troubled-looking brow, Makuch peppers his speech with Hebrew and Yiddish words such as "shalom" and "meshuga;" he has been asked more times than he can remember what it means for a non-Jew to run a Jewish festival for an audience mainly composed of other non-Jews. His reply is often to describe himself as a Shabbos goy, keeping alive the torch of Jewish culture.

Since 1998, non-Jews like Makuch, who preserve and promote Jewish culture and heritage, are honored each year at an awards ceremony during the Festival, presided over by the Israeli ambassador. So far more than 150 people all over the country have received the award. Some, like Makuch, run Jewish cultural events; others cut the grass and clean up cemeteries, teach classes, rescue tombstones, organize little museums. Some have the support of their communities; others work in isolation or even encounter hostility.

Until recently, Jews were largely absent from the enthusiastic crowds who throng Festival events. "Many Jewish people come to Poland, fly into Warsaw, go straight to Auschwitz, then want to get out," the Krakow-born American philanthropist Ted Taube told me once. "But until the war, Poland had the most prolific, culturally diverse, creative Jewish population anywhere, ever. We can't afford to relegate those people to a postscript in history." Although they are still a minority, more and more Jewish fans and tourists have been turning up in recent years, in part because of special tours run by organizations such as the Taube Foundation and the American Jewish Committee.

"I love it here," Cantor Benzion Miller, a Bobover Hasid who lives in Borough Park, Brooklyn, tells me. We are ensconced in armchairs in the crowded little lounge of the Hotel Eden, a kosher establishment opened in the 1990s by an American, Allen Haberberg, in a restored 15th century building in the heart of Kazimierz. The Eden has a mezuzah on every door, both a pub and a private mikvah in the basement, free WiFi Internet and an umbrella-shaded outdoor "Garden of Eden."

A roly-poly man with a full white beard, Miller has been a fixture of the Festival of Jewish Culture for the past 15 years, both performing and holding workshops on topics ranging from Hasidic chanting to ritual slaughter. Miller was born in a displaced persons camp in Germany where his parents met after World War II. His father, who had lost his first wife and children in the Holocaust, came from Oswiecim—the town nearly 40 miles from Krakow outside of which the Nazis built Auschwitz. Before World War II, Oswiecim was home to about 12,000 people, more than half of them Jews. Miller's grandfather was a hazan, a cantor, there.

Miller always participates in a sometimes riotous public Havdalah ceremony, held in the grandiose Tempel Synagogue, the only 19th-century synagogue in Poland to survive the Holocaust intact. Used by the Nazis as a stable and warehouse, it languished in sad repair until the 1990s, when, with funding from the state and sponsorship from the World Monuments Fund, it underwent a full restoration and is now used for concerts as well on religious occasions. It is filled to capacity, mainly with local Poles, for the Festival Havdalah, which features a mix of hazanut, klezmer and tisch singing that has rabbis in streimels and spectators in summer attire dancing together in the aisles. "I see what is going on here as a continuation of what once was; you try to continue," Miller says.

Over the past 20 years, most attention has been paid in Krakow to rediscovering the city's "lost" Jewish culture and promoting it to a non-Jewish public, through tourism and entertainment or through various educational institutions such as the Center for Jewish Culture or the Galicia Jewish Museum. But contemporary Jewish life in the city is now also getting a boost.

Over tea in the garden of the Eden, I talk with Rabbi Edgar Gluck, who, in black hat and long wispy beard, can often be seen walking Kazimierz streets like a pre-war patriarch. A politically savvy, German-born Orthodox rabbi in his 70s, he divides his time between Brooklyn and Poland. In New York City, he is known as the co-founder of the orthodox Hatzolah Volunteer Ambulance Corps. "I was in the World Trade Center, taking people out, as the building was coming down," he tells me, recalling the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.

Here he is the Chief Rabbi of Galicia, a symbolic honorific given to him by Krakow's Jewish community, whom he serves on occasion as hazan. He spends much of his time, though, working toward the preservation of Jewish cemeteries and Holocaust mass graves. But Gluck has rabbinic company and lots of it. "In Krakow now," goes one joke, "there are now five rabbisÑfor three Jews and 20 opinions." One rabbi, brought in by Shavei Israel, a Jerusalem-based group that works with "lost Jews" around the world, is the "official" Jewish community rabbi. Then there is a rabbi who runs the Chabad operation and an American female rabbi who operates a small, offshoot Reform group.

There's also the new JCC, financed by Britain's World Jewish Relief and the Joint Distribution Committee, which occupies a sleek five-story building on the grounds of the Tempel Synagogue. Like so much else in Krakow's Jewish universe, the initiative for the JCC came from a non-Jewish source—Britain's Prince Charles, who was moved by the plight of the poor and aging Jews of the city during a 2002 visit. Charles returned to Krakow in 2008 for the JCC's inauguration: Wearing a kippah, he helped affix a mezuzah to the door.

"Jewish life is more open and safer here than anywhere else I've been in Europe," says Jonathan Ornstein, the director of the JCC. I meet Ornstein, a 39-year-old self-described "atheist Jewish vegetarian" for a cappuccino at a cafe on the hip Plac Nowy, the pre-war Jewish market square whose central building was a kosher poultry slaughterhouse. Plac Nowy, now a booming center of nightlife, is full of music clubs and trendy bars, which Ornstein prefers to the "Jewish-style" cafes on Szeroka. "We have kids from the Sunday school playing in the courtyard with the gate open; we feel no danger, no fear."

Born in New York, Ornstein moved to Israel as a young man and relocated to Krakow seven years ago, teaching Hebrew at the Jagiellonian University. The Jagiellonian has a Jewish studies program that was launched in the 1980s; its outgrowth, the Center for Jewish Culture, opened in 1992 in a renovated former prayer house off Plac Nowy. Ornstein rejects nostalgia for the city's past and focuses on stimulating contemporary Jewish expression. The bulletin boards in the JCC's lobby flutter with announcements for clubs and social events: a Hanukkah party this year lasted until dawn, and the JCC's Facebook group boasts more than 360 members. "People talk about Kazimierz as being the "former" Jewish quarter of Krakow. But I say, why former?" says Ornstein. "It is the present Jewish quarter of Krakow. You can't measure it in numbers but in feeling. Jews live freely; people know things about Judaism and Jewish traditions; there's a Jewish studies program at the university; there's the Festival." As he sees it, "Nobody alive today has a memory of Kazimierz when it was better than it is now."

Back at the cafe at the Klezmer Hois, I spot my friend Konstanty (Kostek) Gebert. "This is where I hold court," jokes Gebert, an award-winning author and a veteran of the Jewish Flying University. As an underground Solidarity activist, he deliberately chose a Jewish-sounding pen name—Dawid Warszawski—to write in the dissident press. In 1989, Gebert was at the Round Table talks between the communist authorities and Solidarity that facilitated the peaceful ouster of the old regime. He was the founding editor of Midrasz, a Jewish cultural and intellectual monthly, and today he heads the Warsaw-based Taube Center for the Renewal of Jewish Culture in Poland.

In addition to Krakow, small active Jewish communities are found in Warsaw, Lodz, Wroclaw and several other Polish cities. I'm far from sure that there is a solid enough critical mass to ensure their long-term survival. Nonetheless, in many senses, to be Jewish here and to accept Jewishness as a positive identity choice now is increasingly normal. Or at least much more normal than it was 10, 20 and certainly 30 years ago. "Today's Jewish children in Poland, whatever else the future holds in store for them, will never grow up knowing, as their parents did, that to be Jewish means to be alone and vulnerable," Gebert wrote in his 2008 memoir Living in the Land of Ashes."Hopes have been successfully built on much more shaky foundations."

He was not always this certain. He likes to joke about how, in the mid-1980s, he told a pair of Polish journalists that he didn't think Jews in Poland could survive. The journalists—writer Malgorzata Niezabitowska and photographer Tomasz Tomaszewski—were working on an article for National Geographic that eventually became a book called Remnants: The Last Jews of Poland. They asked Gebert how he saw the future for Jews in the country. "I believe we are the last ones," he replied. "Definitely." Today, he puffs his pipe and straightens his kippah. "Ugh. Never talk to the media!" he says laughing. And Krakow's moveable Jewish feast of drink and food and conversation goes on.

Ruth Ellen Gruber has chronicled European Jewish issues for more than 20 years. Her books include National Geographic Jewish Heritage Travel: A Guide to Eastern Europe and Virtually Jewish: Reinventing Jewish Culture in Europe.

Soliman Lawrence is a Berlin-based photographer who is documenting the renaissance of Jewish Poland.

July 2 (Bloomberg) -- As Ivor Lichterman led prayers at Warsaw’s only pre-war synagogue, he was “overcome with awe” to be standing where his father led the last services before the Holocaust wiped out 1,000 years of Jewish history.

Lichterman, 55, of Tucson, Arizona, is visiting Poland with a group of 70 cantors who want to help rebuild those traditions, singing at venues including the future site of Warsaw’s Museum of the History of Polish Jews, the National Opera and the Jewish Culture Festival in Krakow.

“This synagogue had a great musical legacy; it was famous around the world,” Lichterman said in an interview after the service. He remembers his father Jakub Lichterman telling him how “they used to pack people in” and how “it was standing room only.”

More than 3 million Polish Jews were murdered in Nazi death camps, many of them on German-occupied Polish soil. About 100,000 survivors stayed in Poland after the war. Following a 1968 anti-Semitic campaign by Poland’s communist government, that number shrank to 30,000 to 40,000 today, according to statistics cited by the U.S. State Department.

Lichterman, who led the prayers together with his brother Joel of Denver, says the service raised “a lot of mixed feelings. I kept looking up over there,” where a 60-member choir stood before the war. “They’re probably all gone. Almost nobody survived.”

‘Golden Age’
The cantors’ tour is sponsored by the Taube Foundation for Jewish Life & Culture. The foundation uses “north of $100 million” to support projects in Poland including museums, cultural centers, schools and synagogues that are “rebuilding the infrastructure of Jewish life” from a 1,000-year “golden age,” its chairman Tad Taube, 78, said by telephone.

“The map of Jewish life disappeared from Poland” as synagogues, cemeteries, cultural centers, libraries and archives were destroyed by the Nazis, Taube said.

“The entire gamut of Jewish culture became a target of the Holocaust, as well as the people that were murdered during that period,” Taube said.

That’s obscured the story of the previous millennium, when the Jews of Poland -- including those living in what is now Lithuania and Ukraine -- built up “an enormous resource in literature, philosophy, mathematics, the arts, the theater” that laid the foundations of Jewish life in the U.S., Israel, and around the world, Taube said.

Rescuers HonoredNathan Lam, president of the Cantors Assembly Foundation, an organizer of the trip, is making his “ninth or tenth” visit to Poland. He said that in addition to teaching people to sing prayers using “the melodies that actually emanated from here,” part of the group’s mission is “to honor the lives” of Poles who rescued Jews from the Holocaust.

“I love being here,” he said after singing in the June 29 service. “I love the fact that Jews are reconnecting here in Poland, and I’m going to do my best to help them come back again, many, many times.”

Taube was born in Krakow in 1931. He left in July 1939, months before the Nazi German invasion in September of that year, after his parents, on a business trip in the U.S., became aware of the growing danger and decided to emigrate.

After working as a real-estate developer and serving on the board of Koret of California, a clothing producer, Taube began his first “significant” involvement in philanthropy in 1979, as a founding director of the Koret Foundation.

Taube’s decision almost two decades later to throw his weight behind the cause of Jewish life in Poland “was an evolutionary process” inspired partly by billionaire Ronald S. Lauder’s philanthropic work in the country after the 1989 fall of communism, “and it didn’t have an awful lot to do with the fact that I happened to have been born in Poland,” Taube says.

Oct. 30, 2009U.S. Jews see old horrors, new hope in PolandBy RACHEL POMERANCE

David Propis and his daughter Dena sang the Retzei at the Poland National Opera this summer. Propis, president of the American Cantors Assembly, led 70 colleagues on a tour of Poland and Israel.

As a child, David Propis, the Jewish liturgical singer of Houston's Congregation Beth Yushurun, adored singing prayers with his father, Dov Propis, at his congregations in the Northeast.

His favorite was their first duet, a piece called the Retzei that asks God to accept one's prayers. And Propis still recalls the Sabbath performance when his father wrapped his prayer shawl around him, and with it a “feeling of protection.”

The prayer was made famous by Gershon Sirota, who sang at Warsaw's Tlomatzka Synagogue and was killed, along with his family, in the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.

So when Propis, the new president of the Cantors Assembly, the world's largest body of professional cantors, helped lead about 70 of his colleagues and hundreds of congregants on a two-week tour through Poland and Israel recently, he once again performed the Retzei. This time, it was with his daughter, about 100 yards from where the Tlomatzka Synagogue once stood.

Their duet was part of the Cantors Assembly concert with the Polish National Opera, a symbolic evening that honored the life of Irena Sendler, a Pole who rescued 2,500 children from the Warsaw Ghetto.

The group traveled to Poland to commemorate the Holocaust, but also in spite of it. They wanted to honor Poland's significant number of “Righteous Gentiles,” the non-Jewish Poles who risked their lives and those of their families to save Jews, said Propis, the child of Lithuanian Jews whose families were murdered in the Holocaust. And they also went to learn about the Jewish heritage of Poland, the center of European Jewish life and home to 3.5 million Jews before the war.

In that spirit, the cantors' tour, which marked the largest assembly of cantors in Poland since before WWII, reflected a message of gratitude and a quest for healing, reconciliation and their own heritage.

The Poland portion of the trip was sponsored in large part by the San Francisco-based Taube Foundation for Jewish Life and Culture, which aims to reconnect Jews with their vibrant history in Poland, where Jews lived for 1,000 years. Some 75 percent of American Jews trace their roots to “Polish lands,” according to the foundation, an area that extends to parts of Ukraine, Austria and Hungary.

Meanwhile, Poland, in the wake of 20 years of democracy since the fall of communism, is seeking to reclaim its own Jewish heritage by way of preservation and cultural activities. The renewed interest in Jewish culture has helped spawn an emerging Jewish community as Poles uncover their own Jewish roots. But in most cases, Jewish activities appear to be organized by non-Jews, supported by government agencies and enthusiastically received.

Perhaps the most shining example was Krakow's 19th Jewish Culture Festival, a nine-day panoply of Jewish culture. The program featured hundreds of Jewish classes and concerts including a prayer service by the Cantors Assembly before a nighttime throng of thousands.

At its concert with the National Opera, sponsored by the Office of the Prime Minister of Poland, the Cantors Assembly received a standing ovation from a crowd of 2,000.

That kind of reception helped undo some of the stereotypes held by those on the tour.

As a child of survivors, “many of us harbor difficult feelings,” he said. Propis' mother, who was sent to a forced-labor camp, was the only member of her family to survive; his father escaped with two brothers.

However, “it was important that basically a new narrative be created,” he said. “We know the harshness and the horrors that have happened, but I think not enough is being said about the goodness in Poland,” he said. “I think this trip kind of cleared the clouds away.”

Still, the group's visit to the camps of Auschwitz and Birkenau marked a seminal moment on the tour.

At Auschwitz, the cantors held a prayer service and unfurled the Torah scroll around Holocaust survivors and their children. And at Birkenau, the group's visit coincided with a tour by hundreds of Israeli soldiers, who marched down the rail tracks.

“It's very hard to put in words,” said Steve Lee, reflecting on the trip.

These ceremonies, combined with the religious singing, strengthened his Jewish identity, said Lee, a member of Congregation Beth Yeshurun, whose paternal grandparents emigrated from Poland. At the same time, Lee says the tour “changed my entire view of Poland,” explaining that he began to see Poles also as Nazi victims and not only as Nazi collaborators.

Some 3 million Poles were killed during World War II.

For his part, Propis also came to new realizations. He marveled at the extent of Poland's Jewish and cantorial heritage and its current friendship with Israel, along with the Polish interest in Jewish culture and the stories of “Righteous Gentiles.”

And the National Opera, of course, provided him with his own kind of homecoming.

“I had a dream come true,” Propis says of performing the Retzei with his daughter, Dena, a junior at Northwestern University who sings at a Chicago synagogue.

It “just came full circle.”

July 2, 2009 Scent of San Francisco, stench of Los Angeles(excerpt)linkBy Leah Garchik

Tad Taube, co-honorary consul with Christopher Kerosky for the Republic of Poland, jetted off to Krakow for today's ceremonies cementing the new sister-city relationship between Krakow and San Francisco. Mayor Gavin Newsom originally was scheduled to go, said Krakow-born Taube, but "his schedule got fairly tight because of his political plans and the baby." Supervisor Bevan Dufty will be representing the city, along with the Office of Protocol's Matthew Goudeau.

Krakow ceremonies will include the formal document signing, by Dufty and Krakow Mayor Jacek Majchrowski, and culminate with an evening reception for 150 guests. Taube is leading the trip with Shana Penn, executive director of the Taube Foundation.

WARSAW (JTA) -- Like many children of Jews who grew up in Poland after World War II, Anna Makowska-Kwapisiewicz was sheltered from her Jewish provenance for much of her life.

There were clues, of course. Her exotic dark eyes and hair occasionally drew remarks about her “Gypsy” or “Spanish” beauty. Her grandmother would constantly teach her the catechism so she could recite it “when they return.” And her grandfather told stories of hiding in the forest.

A performance from the 2008 Krakow Jewish Festival, which with its array of Jewish culture attracts tens of thousands of visitors -- mostly non-Jews. (limaoscarjuliet/Creative Commons)

But it wasn’t until she repeated an anti-Semitic joke she heard in high school that her mother broke down and confessed that her father was, in fact, a Jew.

The news set Makowska-Kwapisiewicz on a path of discovery from Jewish study to ritual observance. Now she is a Jewish educator building a Jewish home and life -- complete with plans for Jewish schooling for her year-old daughter, Nina.

Makowska-Kwapisiewicz is part of a Jewish awakening taking place in Poland.

Like a country of amnesiacs waking up from the trauma of Nazism followed by the silence and historical whitewashing of communism, Poles are now trying to piece together their collective memory. In doing so they are discovering, often in quite personal ways, their Jewish roots.

“We are so much interconnected,” the former president of Poland, Aleksander Kwasniewski, told JTA at a dinner in Warsaw. “I feel that part of my heritage is Jewish tradition,” he said, explaining that his grandmother lived in Vilnus, a heavily Jewish city, and she knew about Jewish dishes like cholent, the Sabbath stew.

If a Pole says “he has not one even drop of Jewish blood in this body,” then he is “not right,” Kwasniewski said.

While for Poles this awakening is about discovering their Jewish roots, for Jews worldwide it’s about discovering their Polish Jewish roots.

Karen Underhill, a doctoral student in Polish literature at the University of Chicago who is a former bookstore owner in Krakow, says Jews visiting Poland used to come by her shop seeking information about their heritage. Poland, she says, has become a place for Jews to rediscover their Jewish roots, particularly those who do not have a strong connection to contemporary Jewish communal life or Israel.

This month, American Jewish visitor Jeff Wachtel said he saw his own family when visiting the Galicia Jewish museum, which houses an exhibit of Mayer Kirshenblatt’s paintings of his boyhood Polish town.

“I had no sense of what their life was like,” said Wachtel, a senior assistant to the president of Stanford University. But when he heard Kirshenblatt talk of his Poland, it reminded him of his own family.

“When I was listening to it, I was sure that that’s where my mother grew up,” Wachtel said. “For the first time, part of my past became very understood in my mind.”

Three-quarters of American Jews trace their roots to Greater Poland -- including Poland and parts of Ukraine, Austria and Hungary -- according to Tad Taube, the San Francisco-based philanthropist who is funding a variety of efforts to connect American Jews to their Polish Jewish heritage.

Taube, a Krakow native, argues that “worship” of the Holocaust has prompted Jews to foresake the 1,000 years of Jewish history in Poland that preceded it, even though it was a “golden period” of Jewish life that gave rise to important religious and cultural development. Ashkenazi Judaism, in fact, was codified in Warsaw.

Approximately 3.5 million Jews lived in Poland before the war; more than 90 percent disappeared in the Holocaust.

Despite continuing anti-Semitism after the war, some Jews stayed in Poland. Their descendants, typically of mixed heritage, include newly Jewish-identified Poles who are now free to reconnect to their Jewish roots thanks to democracy replacing communism.

As Poles uncover their Jewish pasts, a small Jewish community is re-emerging here. Michael Schudrich, the New York-bred chief rabbi of Poland, says there are about 30,000 Jews in Poland.

Many newly identified Jews find their way to Jewish institutions and groups like Czulent, a young Jewish association whose name references not only the traditional Shabbat stew but also the “melting pot” of its members’ mixed heritage.

Taube Philanthropies is trying to reattach the Jewish-Polish umbilical cord with its projects restoring Jewish pride in Poland. They include a Museum of the History of Polish Jews, slated to open in 2011 at the site of the former Warsaw Ghetto, a new Jewish community center in Krakow and Jewish heritage tours to reconnect American Jews with their lost Polish Jewish heritage.

Taube also supports the Krakow Jewish Festival, which held its 19th annual event this month, showcasing a wide range of Jewish culture, from classes in Jewish cooking to Yiddish singing and genealogy research. Like so many Jewish projects in Poland, the festival was organized by many non-Jews and drew nearly 30,000 people, according to festival organizers. Most were not Jewish.

In a country that still suffers from some anti-Semitism, the festival creates a safe space for Jews to express their Jewishness, local community leaders said.

That’s the ultimate goal, said Jonathan Ornstein, director of Krakow’s new Jewish Community Center.

This month marks the 20th anniversary of the fall of communism in Poland and the rebirth of Jewish life. Today’s Jewish revival is viable because Poland is a stable democracy for the first time in its history.

Today’s society, based on law and respect for individual rights, provides an environment in which Poland’s citizens can reconnect with a Jewish past that they may hardly know.

The generations born after 1989 no longer harbor fears that the practice of a Jewish religious tradition may bring danger, whether from fascism and the desperations of war or from communist repression. In fact, the emergence of energetic new Jewish institutions and cultural life and traditions promises that the New Poland will regain its visible and important position in the international Jewish community.

It is an incredible outcome following 50 years of Nazi and Soviet domination. But New Poland and the Jewish cultural revival taking place there must be understood against the backdrop of 1,000 years of vibrant Jewish civilization in Poland. This extensive period, often referred to as the “Jewish Golden Era,” is the foundation of today’s global Jewry:†More than 70 percent of the Jews in the United States and more than 60 percent of the Jews living in Israel come from families with roots in Poland.

As Poland’s Chief Rabbi Michael Schudrich has noted, “Where would Israel and American Jewry be without their Polish history?”

Rabbi Schudrich’s question recognizes that Jews, above all others, live their history. Their sense of peoplehood supersedes differences in practices, and their commitment to Israel helps bind them together. It is continuity with the past and the promise of the future that Jews share with one another and with the world around them. Their deep and long heritage also serves as the underpinning of Judeo-Christian Western culture. Where would Western civilization be without Judaism and Jewish history?

Indeed, the Western view embodies a Judeo-Christian perspective that Western culture owes much of its foundations to that Jewish Golden Era. The Jewish millennium in Poland began in the 11th century, when European Jews started moving eastward into Poland and its neighboring states. Across shifting political allegiances and boundaries, these Jewish pioneers held a single religious and cultural identity. The communities they built performed a critical role in the development of Eastern Europe, with Poland at its center.

In the 16th century, the culture and life of Yiddish-speaking Eastern European Jews was co-extant with the Polish empire, which at its height extended from the Baltic in the north through parts of Russia and Ukraine in the east and south into the Balkans.

The emergence of Yiddish literature, centers of rabbinic learning, and new Judaic practices during the 17th and 18th centuries reflected a richness of traditional culture in a changing, more secular world. Migration west, to northern Europe and to the Americas during the 19th and early 20th centuries, was matched by a new Jewish urbanism and an emerging Jewish middle class throughout central Europe. On the eve of World War II, one in seven Warsaw inhabitants was Jewish.

After the devastation of the Holocaust, few could imagine that again there would be functioning synagogues in eight Polish cities, Jewish day schools and academic programs with enrollments in the thousands, and community centers where Jews of all ages share companionship and deepen their understanding of Judaism.

Who could have predicted during the long years of Soviet domination and precarious Jewish life that Poland would ever become a democracy with Jewish legislators in Parliament, Jewish cabinet members and Jewish politicians active in towns across the land? Did anyone foresee that Poland and Israel would become important trading partners and strategic allies, or that Israeli visitors would be commonplace in Polish cities?

Moreover, Jewish cultural life is stronger for the willingness of non-Jewish Poles to support their fellow citizens in the exploration and celebration of a long-shared culture. Education in democratic norms has made both Poland’s government and its people increasingly intolerant of anti-Semitism. Growing tolerance and an awareness of Jewish participation and integration in civil society have opened Polish eyes to their newly rediscovered culture of Judaism.

Witness, for example, the Jewish Culture Festival held in Krakow each summer. This national and international celebration of Jewish culture attracts nearly 20,000 non-Jewish and Jewish participants from Poland, Europe, the United States and Israel.

Through support of events like this, with all their positive implications, the Taube Foundation joins with other international Jewish organizations and individuals to renew our shared commitment to strengthen the institutional life of Polish Jewry and broaden the world’s understanding of Jewish peoplehood as viewed through the historical role of Polish Jews.

Tad Taube is the chairman of the Taube Foundation for Jewish Life & Culture and honorary consul for the Republic of Poland. This summer, the foundation will celebrate a new sister-city relationship between Krakow and San Francisco.

In fact, my reaction seemed pretty typical. It seemed each time I told someone I was off to Poland, eyebrows would climb in response as if to say, "Really? Why?"

A family friend joked: "What'd you do?" Wrong, that is.

In other words, Poland has the reputation that the country is exotic in a bizarre way, still haunted by the Holocaust, and Communist ugly.

As a freelance reporter, I was brought there by the San Francisco-based Taube Foundation for Jewish Life & Culture on one of its Jewish heritage tours this summer.

Helmed by Tad Taube, a Krakow native who fled Poland as a child, the group is dedicated to reconnecting American Jews with Poland, where, according to the group, 75 percent of American Jews can trace their roots. The definition of Poland here is a liberal one and refers to "Polish lands" which, given shifting boundaries, stretch from Ukraine to Hungary. (Poland, per se, didn't even exist between the wars.)

About 250,000 of Poland's 3.5 million Jews survived the Holocaust, says Shana Penn, the foundation's executive director. And for many American Jews, Poland conjures hell and barbed wire, not the thousand years of Jewish history that preceded it.

But, as Taube puts it, Jewish history was murdered along with 6 million Jews -- and reconnecting Jews with their lost heritage restores a sense of pride in their ancestors' landmark achievements. Poland, in fact, was the center and birthplace of Ashkenazic Jewry and rich with Yiddish theater and Jewish scholars whose culture permeated the country.

Taube, through a variety of efforts, namely his Jewish heritage tours, wants to make that link. He wants Jews from Poland to think more of themselves than just having "cheated death."

His efforts are supported by Poland itself.

In the aftermath of Nazi exterminating, Communist whitewashing and two decades of democracy, Poland is searching for its soul, and finding that it's deeply Jewish. In some cases, individual Poles are discovering and celebrating their personal Jewish heritage.

Today's Poland hosts Jewish community centers, schools, and plenty of preservation projects -- including a new Museum of the History of Polish Jews, slated to open in 2011 on the site of the former Warsaw Ghetto. The museum includes a reconstructed "virtual shtetl" project that has Poles submitting artifacts about Jewish life in those small villages.

And Krakow boasts a Jewish Culture Festival that's among the largest in Europe.

More than 200 events packed the nine-day program that had this city bumping the first week of July. Advertised on blue banners draped across Krakow's cobblestone streets, the festival drew some 30,000 guests, according to organizers. Most of them are not Jewish, while the entertainers mostly are, leading courses in Jewish cooking, Hebrew calligraphy, and performing concerts. The audience turned out in throngs for the festival finale, jamming the plaza of this city's old Jewish quarter to hear Klezmer music and songs in Ladino, the language of Sephardic Jews.

In fact, the festival is such a big deal that when I entered a local shop in search of a disposable camera, the clerk explained they were all out: "Sorry, it's the Jewish festival," he said.

Now it was my turn to hike an eyebrow and wonder if I'd heard correctly.

This is Poland?

Before this trip, I had sized it up as the site for a pilgrimage to the concentration camps.

And I did see Auschwitz and Birkenau; in some way, I feel fortunate to have witnessed the crime scenes.

At Auschwitz, there were a group of squawking black birds overhead, and I wondered if they were singing or laughing, and what the prisoners would have made of them 60 years ago.

Inside brick barracks, glass cases housed gruesome displays -- grey human hair and a sample of the tapestry it was weaved into, along with shoes, prosthetic devices and eyeglasses. I thought I might be sick to my stomach.

Birkenau was worse. Strictly a death camp, it held ashes and rubble, the eerie emptiness of tracks and mean, flimsy barracks.

We left these places for the nearby Auschwitz Jewish Center, which has a different mission -- to tell the story of the town of Oswiecim before WWII. Renamed Auschwitz by the Nazis, it was one of many densely Jewish villages in Poland.

But this center, which opened in 2000, represents the story that's beginning to be told more often as Poland pieces together its past and allows for a different future.

We saw glimpses of the future in a variety of places, like the revitalization of Polish culture and economy. Warsaw is actually lush -- packed with parks -- with a lovely, reconstructed Old Town. And Krakow, though the word sounds like something stuck in one's throat, is as charming a city as you would find in old Europe. Its town square, lined with cafes, seems to embrace the city's whole population at night for the European art of dining and people-watching.

And the picture of Poland, then and now, emerges in the joy of the Jewish Culture Festival and the preservation work for the Museum of the History of Polish Jews and Warsaw's Jewish Historical Institute, and by the Poles -- newly discovering their personal Jewish identities -- at this city's new Jewish Community Center.

The richness of Polish Jewish life before the war doesn't lessen the pain of the Holocaust. But taken together, as these layered histories unfold, there's a new way of seeing Poland, and for Jewish visitors -- ourselves.

April 9, 2009Taube foundation launches a new way to tour Polandlinkby Dan Pine, staff writer

Tad Taube assumes most people are familiar with the six years of Polish history when millions of Jews died in the Holocaust. Now he wants everyone to know about the preceding 1,000 years, when Jewish life in Poland thrived.

The founder of the Belmont-based Taube Foundation for Jewish Life and Culture recently launched Poland Jewish Heritage Tours. What travelers get is a 12-day taste of Poland’s vanished Jewish past — it once was home to 3.5 millions Jews, Europe’s largest Jewish population — and its reborn Jewish present.

“The Holocaust was such an overwhelming act, it tends to blind people to everything else,” said Taube. “Most of the contributions by the Jewish people to philosophy, science, math, theater, every facet of human endeavor, actually developed during that 1,000 years in Poland. It’s a huge contribution to the culture of the Western world.”

Tours will be scheduled year-round, but the first official Poland Jewish Heritage Tour departs this summer.

Tad Taube (center) at the Festival of Jewish Culture in Krakow, Poland.

Itineraries can be customized, but most will include sites of Jewish historical significance in Polish cities, as well as day trips to the mountains. Participants also will engage in meetings with Jewish leaders, politicians and the media, and will go on outings to cultural events, synagogues, restored Jewish cemeteries and, yes, former concentration camps.

But Taube insists the emphasis will not be on the Holocaust. “The emphasis of these tours,” he said, “is to expose those that join us to the incredible changes taking place in Poland.”

He cited the government’s sponsorship of the new $90 million Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw, being funded in part by the Taube and Koret foundations. The Festival of Jewish Culture, which takes place every summer in Krakow and will be included on some tours, is one of the largest of its kind worldwide. Moreover, Poland remains a staunch ally of Israel.

Shana Penn and Ron Wexler are playing key roles in organizing the Poland Jewish Heritage Tours, along with a team of Jewish educators, scholars and experts. Penn is the executive director of the Taube Foundation for Jewish Life and Culture who has done extensive research on modern Poland; Wexler is a scholar of Jewish history with 30 years of experience in the cultural tourism industry.

“You don’t really get to understand the dramatic and positive changes in Poland,” said Penn, “unless you actually go and see the places where these 10 centuries of Jewish life existed.”

With large numbers of American Jews tracing their ancestry, at least in part, back to Poland, Penn said the tours will offer a genealogical component, with trained Polish genealogists on hand to help participants retrace the steps of their forebears.

Working with distinguished Polish educators and historians, Taube and Penn tried to make sure they did not launch a glorified travel agency. Rather, Penn said, “We look at this as a much-needed educational resource and a new kind of cultural tour experience.”

Early converts to the importance of such tours include Skip and Linda Law, a South Bay Jewish couple that traveled to Poland in 2005 on a Taube-organized trip.

It was “a profound experience,” said Linda Law. She said highlights included “Theodore Bikel singing in the 900-year-old temple, conversations with participants, small group discussions — especially with Chief Rabbi Michael Schudrich.” The trip “gave me a deeper understanding of and connection to Judaism.”

“It’s very negative to have a disconnect in history that stops in 1945,” Taube said. “So we’ve been working on putting back the pieces.”
For more information on Poland Jewish Heritage Tours, call (800) 355-9994 or visit http://www.PolandJewishHeritageTours.com

San Francisco and Krakow, Poland signed a new sister-city agreement July 2 at Krakow’s town hall, completing a partnership orchestrated in part by Bay Area philanthropist Tad Taube.

The signing ceremony at Wielopolski Palace was attended by Taube, S.F. Polish Consul General Christopher Kerosky and Matthew Goudeau from San Francisco’s Office of Protocol.

Tad Taube and Polish consul in San Francisco Christopher Kerosky sign a sister-city agreement in Krakow, Poland, on July 2. photo/piotr malecki

Among the Polish dignitaries present was Krakow Mayor Jacek Majchrowski, who signed the document along with Taube and Kerosky. The event ended with an evening reception for 150 guests.

The partnership officially was announced in April. Those involved said they hope the relationship will help foster business, civic and cultural links between the two cities.

The ceremony attendees also included many members of the San Francisco Jewish and secular communities, including the Krakow-born Taube, who is an honorary consul for the Republic of Poland; Daniel Sokatch, CEO of the S.F.-based Jewish Community Federation; Jeffrey Farber, CEO of the Koret Foundation; Shelley Hebert, public affairs director for the Stanford Hospital and Clinics; and Shana Penn, executive director of the Taube Foundation.

San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom was originally scheduled to attend, the San Francisco Chronicle reported, quoting Taube as saying “[but] his schedule got fairly tight because of his political plans and the baby.”

The ceremony was one stop on a 10-day Poland Jewish Heritage Tour, a trip organized by the Taube Foundation for Jewish Life and Culture, of which Tad Taube is chairman.

Thursday, July 16, 2009Auschwitz through new eyes: Survivor, teens take emotional tour of Poland and Hungarylink

Annie Glass survived Auschwitz. In June, she returned to see the barracks, the security fence, the gate that states “Work will set you free.”

She had returned to Poland on one other occasion since she left her native country in 1951. But this time, the 85-year-old woman had a new friend by her side: a 16-year-old San Francisco teenager, Ida Cuttler.

“Oh, we became the best of friends,” Glass said.

Annie Glass (left) and Ida Cuttler. photo/courtesy of ida cuttler

Glass and Cuttler traveled to Poland from June 29 to July 8 as part of Next Chapter, a school year–long program that since 2006 has linked 25 Bay Area teens with Holocaust survivors. For the first time this year, the program culminated in a summertime trip to Poland.

“I was definitely seeing Poland not only through my eyes but through Annie’s eyes as well,” Cuttler said. “When things got emotional, I was there for her, and she was there for me. It felt great to be a part of her discovery of a place that was once so anti-Semitic and is now emerging as a place interested in Jewish life and history.”

Next Chapter is sponsored by the S.F.-based Jewish Family and Children’s Services and the Taube Foundation for Jewish Life and Culture.

Eight students participated this year. Every Thursday, from October through May, they met at Congregation Emanu-El in San Francisco to learn about Polish and Holocaust history, and even about how to properly interview someone to get their oral history. Teachers included historians from the Holocaust Center of Northern California and Holocaust survivors, scholars, archivists and social workers from JFCS.

Students were then paired with a Polish survivor. Cuttler and Glass spent many afternoons together while Cuttler asked the woman about her life before, during and after the war. The result was a 12-page history authored by Cuttler that chronicles one generation’s war experience, and the younger generation’s reaction to those stories.

“When Annie says ‘Auschwitz,’” Cuttler writes in Glass’ oral history, my heart beats a little quicker and gets lodged in my throat because I’m afraid to hear of the suffering that is surely to come.”

“There were moments when [the interviews] were hard,” Cuttler said. “But I was actually more emotional when we went to Poland and I was there with her, when I was actually seeing the stuff she had talked about.”

Annie Glass (left) and Ida Cuttler. photo/courtesy of ida cuttler

Glass was the only survivor to accompany six teenagers from Next Chapter to Poland and Hungary. They visited historical sites, including death camps, museums and synagogues.

“When they walked through Auschwitz and Krakow, the commentary Annie provided was something they could not get anywhere else,” said Taylor Epstein, the youth programs coordinator at JFCS, who went to Poland with the students.

Students also got an up-close look at contemporary Poland via such events as the Jewish Cultural Festival, an annual music and cultural festival in Krakow this year attended by 13,000 people.

Glass couldn’t believe her eyes — throngs of people in the streets, most of them non-Jews, eager to get a taste of klezmer music and Jewish culture.

“People need to go to Poland not to see that monument or this monument, but to see the rebirth of Jewish life,” Glass said. “Poles are now so eager to be connected with Jews. What’s going on in Krakow, I couldn’t believe it — I was really surprised and amazed.”

Annie was born Chana Glatt in 1924 in Wierzbnik, now called Starachowice. She had three sisters and one brother, all of whom attended Hebrew school after school every day. Her parents owned a fabric store.

She was just 15 years old when the Germans occupied her town in 1939.

“That is one year younger than I am,” Cuttler wrote. “I cannot even begin to imagine what that would be like if, one day, everything I had ever known would be changed forever.”

Glass’s brother, older sister and parents died at various points during the Holocaust. She and her two other sisters managed to survive together for nearly three years in a ghetto, during which time they managed to find work at a labor camp, as opposed to being deported to a death camp.

In 1942, the three remaining sisters were sent to Auschwitz. They watched out for each other there, which might be why the three survived nearly three years in the concentration camp, as well as the death march, when the Nazis forced thousands of Jews to march in January 1945 from Auschwitz to Germany.

Many died on the march. Glass watched as people collapsed or fell into the river. By spring, they had reached Germany.

“It wasn’t human, absolutely not,” she said. “But I consider myself a very strong person — this is a fact. And thank God I survived and can tell my story.”

Glass and her sisters eventually all moved to San Francisco. One sister is still living, and she and Glass live within blocks of one another in the Sunset District.

“For a compassionate person like Annie to emerge from something so terrible shows us that the human soul really does go toward kindness,” Cuttler said.

Six San Francisco high school and college students will join Annie Glass, a Holocaust survivor from their city, on her first trip back to Poland since World War II.

The trip, scheduled from June 29 to July 8, is sponsored by the San Francisco-based Next Chapter Project, a partnership of the Taube Foundation for Jewish Life and Culture and the Jewish Family and Children's Services of the San Francisco Bay Area (JFCS).

The trip is the culmination of a seven-month program, organized by JFCS Executive Director Dr. Anita Friedman and youth coordinator Taylor Epstein, in which the students were assigned Holocaust survivors to interview.

The students recorded the survivors' experiences as oral histories or represented them as artwork. They also compiled a booklet of each survivor's story that included information on current Jewish life in Poland.

"The education of the next generation is most important," said Glass in a June 17 article on the project issued by Rabinowitz-Dorf Communications.

Aside from education, Glass added that another goal of the trip is "to look to the future [and see how] the Polish people have changed."

The trip consists of visits to Jewish historical sites, such as the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camps, the Warsaw Ghetto Memorial and the Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw.

Glass and the students will also attend several events, including a concert at Tempel Synagogue, the only Reform synagogue that existed in Krakow before the war, and a group discussion led by the American and Israeli ambassadors to Poland.

The trip will also focus on learning about contemporary Jewish life in Poland and discovering what became of the war-ravaged towns after Hitler's defeat.

"The Poland left behind by these survivors is very different from the Poland that the young people and the survivors will return to," said Tad Taube, chairman of the Taube Foundation, in the June 17 article.

"Our goal is to connect aging survivors with their homeland in a positive way and to connect them with the younger generation against the backdrop of Poland's Jewish renaissance."

According to Rabbi Michael Schudrich, chief rabbi of Poland, who works closely with the Taube Foundation, organizations like the Next Chapter Project are necessary because Jews are just starting to rediscover their Polish roots.

"In 1939, there were 3.5 million Jews in Poland," he said. "In 1944, there were only 315,000 left. Most of these remaining Jews opted out of Poland because if you wanted to feel comfortable being Jewish, you needed to leave. The ones that stayed gave up their identity and often didn't even tell their children that they were Jewish."

In 1989, the Iron Curtain was lifted and Communism fell in Poland. At this time, Schudrich explained, "thousands of Poles were able to discover their Jewish roots" and "the rest of the population discovered that there were educated Jews in Poland."

The Next Chapter Project was inspired by a series of cultural and academic events hosted by the Taube Foundation in 2006, whose objective was to demonstrate that Poles are beginning to rejuvenate Jewish culture. During this series, Jewish and Christian speakers met with local Holocaust survivors at a public gathering at the Jewish Family and Children's Services in San Francisco.

As the survivors told their stories of the war and their involvement in the renewal of Jewish culture, audience participants asked how they could create connections with Poland today.

The Next Chapter Project was born out of their desire to learn about the experiences of Jews who remained in Poland, as well as what happened to the birthplaces of those survivors who immigrated to San Francisco.

SAN FRANCISCO (KGO) -- There are about 4,000 Northern Californians who are survivors of the Holocaust. It is an experience they say the world should never forget. A look at how one woman is teaching the younger generation.

Annie Glass really does not need to read a book about the Holocaust, she lived it. Now a long-time San Francisco resident, Glass was a teenager when the Germans occupied her small Polish town.

"Life changed for everybody," says Glass. "It was just unbelievable what happened."

Her brother was shot to death, her parents lost forever. She and her two sisters ended up at Auschwitz, the notorious Nazi death camp.

"We had to undress, cut the hair off and my sister was still crying and we have the numbers, you see," says Glass when describing the numbers branded on her arm. "We were not human... I cannot explain to you how I survived."

But she is trying to explain the experience to Ida Cuttler. Cuttler is a 17-year-old San Francisco teenager who is part of what is called the Next Chapter Project. It is a partnership of the San Francisco-based Taube Foundation for Jewish Life and Culture and the Jewish Family and Children's Services of the Bay Area. Cuttler is recording the haunting memories of Glass.

"The last Holocaust survivor is going to die in my generation, so I thought it was really important that these stories get told firsthand," says Cuttler.

For an even deeper understanding, Cuttler and Glass will go back to Poland, back to Auschwitz, with a group of high school and college students.

"I think it's going to be very moving; I think it will be very hard at times," says Cuttler.

That is what she said before the journey back, and once there her feelings did not change, even though at times walking on the killing ground was emotionally draining.

"We lit the candles there in memory of our parents, of our relatives, and small children," says Glass.

They attended a music festival in Krakow enjoyed by Jews and non-Jews alike. Glass brought back memorabilia and memories to share with her husband Charles, who is also a Holocaust survivor. Glass says there is a new feel and new look to her native land that gives her optimism.

"It's time to see a reality that the world is different, the world is better now, especially Poland," she says.

Cuttler says the biggest impression was simply being with Glass and seeing the things she had talked about. The teenager expected sadness but found there was also another side.

"There was this hopefulness to being there that I didn't expect to feel of, well, if someone like her can experience such a place and come out with so much kindness then the human soul must tend to go towards compassion," says Cuttler.

Cuttler and the other students are now writing books which will go to museums and research centers all over the world. If you would like a preview of their work, visit parentsplaceonline.org.

A historical and religious mission to Poland this week has special significance to four local cantors as they share their ministry and musical gifts in Europe's historical Jewish homeland.

Ilan Mamber, Sam Weiss and David Perper and his wife, Faith Steinsnyder, are part of Cantors Assembly 2009, a group of 70 musicians in the vocal arts who left on a 12-day concert tour Monday.

Musicians who lead musical prayer in the synagogue, the cantors are part of an international effort for Jewish revival that's under way in the country.

The initiative is also an opportunity for participants to share their artistry, reconnect with their roots and reintroduce some of the sacred music that was lost in the region during the Holocaust.

"I want to give them something that everyone around them says shouldn't exist," said David Perper, 45, a cantor at Temple Beth Haverim Shir Shalom in Mahwah. "We want to show them that we are here. There's nothing that says you shouldn't have these things."

In 1939, Poland was home to Europe's most significant Jewish community and the center of the cantorial world with the creativity and artistry of its Jewish music in Yiddish.

Organizers say the mission, with its concerts, religious workshops and tours, is a chance for participants to reflect on the region's rich and tragic past but also to help build hope for the future.

"We are returning out of homage and respect to this tradition to which we have dedicated our professional lives," said Nathan Lam, president of the Cantors Assembly Foundation and cantor at a Los Angeles synagogue. "We are also there to remember the great loss in the Shoah and honor the righteous gentiles ... who saved Jewish lives at the risk of their own."

Mamber, 61, of Franklin Lakes, expects visiting for the first time the extermination camps and structural remains of what used to be synagogues will bring on unforeseen emotions.

"I don't know what I'll feel," said Mamber, whose grandparents fled Nazi Germany in 1933. "I feel that I should at least experience it. There's a lot of what I'm about that's there. ... Culturally, it's very important to me."

Born in Israel, Mamber remembers family stories about how his grandparents unsuccessfully tried to warn family members to flee eastern Poland because of Hitler's genocide plan.

For Weiss, 59, of Oradell, whose mother was interred at Auschwitz concentration camp as a teenager, emotions will also be unpredictable.

"I have mixed feelings about it," he said of visiting the death camp.

A cantor at the Jewish Community Center of Paramus, Weiss will help officiate at the death camp service.

The mission, which includes dozens of congregants who will join their cantors, ends in Israel after several workshops, tours and lectures.

Funded partly by the Taube Foundation for Jewish Life and Culture in San Francisco, the mission is one of several public and private initiatives spearheaded after the fall of communism in 1989 to revive Jewish cultural, social and religious life and combat anti-Semitism, neo-fascism and extremism in the Poland.

Cantors in the mission are from across the United States, Canada, Europe and Israel.

E-mail: gavin@northjersey.com

A historical and religious mission to Poland this week has special significance to four local cantors as they share their ministry and musical gifts in Europe's historical Jewish homeland.

LESLIE BARBARO/STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER ASSOCIATED PRESS

Ilan Mamber, a cantor from Franklin Lakes, is visiting Poland and Israel with Cantors Assembly 2009 in a tour to revive Jewish tradition in Poland. Above right, the group performing Tuesday during the groundbreaking ceremony for the Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw.

Ilan Mamber, Sam Weiss and David Perper and his wife, Faith Steinsnyder, are part of Cantors Assembly 2009, a group of 70 musicians in the vocal arts who left on a 12-day concert tour Monday.

Musicians who lead musical prayer in the synagogue, the cantors are part of an international effort for Jewish revival that's under way in the country.

The initiative is also an opportunity for participants to share their artistry, reconnect with their roots and reintroduce some of the sacred music that was lost in the region during the Holocaust.

"I want to give them something that everyone around them says shouldn't exist," said David Perper, 45, a cantor at Temple Beth Haverim Shir Shalom in Mahwah. "We want to show them that we are here. There's nothing that says you shouldn't have these things."

In 1939, Poland was home to Europe's most significant Jewish community and the center of the cantorial world with the creativity and artistry of its Jewish music in Yiddish.

Organizers say the mission, with its concerts, religious workshops and tours, is a chance for participants to reflect on the region's rich and tragic past but also to help build hope for the future.

"We are returning out of homage and respect to this tradition to which we have dedicated our professional lives," said Nathan Lam, president of the Cantors Assembly Foundation and cantor at a Los Angeles synagogue. "We are also there to remember the great loss in the Shoah and honor the righteous gentiles ... who saved Jewish lives at the risk of their own."

Mamber, 61, of Franklin Lakes, expects visiting for the first time the extermination camps and structural remains of what used to be synagogues will bring on unforeseen emotions.

"I don't know what I'll feel," said Mamber, whose grandparents fled Nazi Germany in 1933. "I feel that I should at least experience it. There's a lot of what I'm about that's there. ... Culturally, it's very important to me."

Born in Israel, Mamber remembers family stories about how his grandparents unsuccessfully tried to warn family members to flee eastern Poland because of Hitler's genocide plan.

For Weiss, 59, of Oradell, whose mother was interred at Auschwitz concentration camp as a teenager, emotions will also be unpredictable.

"I have mixed feelings about it," he said of visiting the death camp.

A cantor at the Jewish Community Center of Paramus, Weiss will help officiate at the death camp service.

The mission, which includes dozens of congregants who will join their cantors, ends in Israel after several workshops, tours and lectures.

Funded partly by the Taube Foundation for Jewish Life and Culture in San Francisco, the mission is one of several public and private initiatives spearheaded after the fall of communism in 1989 to revive Jewish cultural, social and religious life and combat anti-Semitism, neo-fascism and extremism in the Poland.

Cantors in the mission are from across the United States, Canada, Europe and Israel.

Poland was the center of the cantorial world and of Jewish life in Europe prior to World War II. Following the extermination of three million Polish Jews — 90 percent of the country's Jewish population — by the Nazis and the end of post-war Soviet Communist rule, Poland is experiencing a Jewish revival.

This week, 70 cantors from the United States, Canada, Europe and Israel will perform at the 19th Jewish Culture Festival in Krakow.

Cantor Efraim Sapir of Temple Emeth in Delray Beach and his wife left Florida on Sunday for Poland where he will perform with the other cantors.

Krakow was never destroyed by the Germans. Synagogues are standing and operating, Sapir said. "It is encouraging being there on Shabbat and mingling with the local Jewish community at the kiddush."

Sapir's trip will have its somber moments too. He said he will chant the "El Male" memorial prayer at the entrance to Auschwitz, where his mother was a prisoner during the Holocaust. "I hope that I will be able to do it," Sapir said. He said he also will say kaddish for his father who survived labor camps and died two years ago.

There is a "Jewish renewal" in Poland today and tremendous interest in Judaism, said Nathan Lam, the leader of the cantors' mission to Poland. Lam is president of the Cantors Assembly Foundation and cantor at the Stephen S. Wise Temple in Los Angeles.

"Cantors can make a difference by going to places in the world where Jews have had a history," Lam said. "Jewish history is part of Poland and Poland is part of Jewish history."

Ron Wexler, who lives in Boca Raton and is the director of Polish Jewish Heritage Tours for the Taube Foundation, said Jews "left a tremendous mark and their contribution to Poland was immeasurable. It was immense."

The Jewish Culture Festival is the biggest in the world, Wexler said. "You say, 'I can't believe what I am seeing.'"

Poles have an interest and blame themselves for what happened to the Jews, he said, adding there is a tremendous yearning to understand and there are ties between Jews and non-Jews in Krakow and Warsaw.

Jews are saying, "You can't destroy us. We are still thriving. We are still having our schools. Nothing is going to destroy the Jewish people," Wexler said.

More than 300 synagogue congregants, many of Polish descent, and six California high school and college students also are on missions to Poland. The Taube Foundation for Jewish Life and Culture in San Francisco is supporting the missions and the Cantors Assembly trip to Poland and Israel.

And the message of the Cherry Hill resident, who is a cantor and recently returned from a trip to Poland where he visited Nazi concentration camps, was just as powerful and reverberating.

"Music is very simple," Snyder said. "If all the rest of life was as simple as music, what a nice world this would be."

Snyder joined Cantor Nathan Lam, president of the Cantors Assembly Foundation, and cantors from across the United States, Israel, Canada and Europe on a historic concert tour of Poland.

"The Polish people knew we were aware what happened at the Holocuast, but we wanted the healing process to happen," Snyder said. "We want to develop a bond with them."

Snyder, 59, was among 75 cantors to join this tour, which included a concert in a pre-war synagogue where cantors performed and at Polish National Opera House. During the two-week trip, Snyder and the other cantors connected with more than a thousand years of Jewish cantorial history. And they shared their common heritage by performing at prestigious venues throughout Poland.

"This was our first mission of this type," Snyder said, "and we will continue with these missions because this was so unbelievably successful."

Also, about 350 lay people joined the weeklong trip to Poland and a weeklong visit to Israel.

"Poland in 1939 was the center of the cantorial world," said Lam. "Creativity and artistry of the cantorial musical form was at its height."

The tour was made possible by the support of California-based philanthropist Tad Taube and the Taube Foundation for Jewish Life and Culture.

"The overall goal of the mission was to start a healing process," said Snyder. "The Holocuast left us with such bad feelings all the way around and it is time now to start healing."

Snyder, who grew up in Buffalo, N.Y., and moved to Cherry Hill three decades ago, studied for four years to be a cantor at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York and became a cantor in 1981.

Judaism has two types of clergy -- the rabbi and the cantor.

"They overlap almost totally," Snyder said. "It means we conduct weddings, funerals, we teach children and adults, and we do all the musical things in the synagogue.

"To be a cantor, you have to have an exceptional voice, you have to have musicality. It is an unusual combination of skills."

Snyder served Congregation Beth El in Cherry Hill until three years ago, when he became the executive administrator of the Cantors Assembly.

Snyder will soon move to Akron, Ohio, to work at the national headquarters.

Last Sunday Cantor Haim Levy of Fresh Meadows set off for the trip of a lifetime.

Levy, 64, joined about 70 cantors from throughout the world for a nine-day concert tour of Poland, once the epicenter for Jewish cantorial music before millions of Polish Jews were killed in the Holocaust.

On July 2, the cantors were scheduled to lead a memorial service at Auschwitz-Birkenau, the largest Nazi concentration camp, where more than 1 million Jews died during the Holocaust. The trip will also bring Levy and the cantors from the United States, Israel, Canada and Europe to performances at the National Opera House in Warsaw, the Krakow Jewish Cultural Festival in Szeroka Square and the Krakow Philharmonic Hall.

“This is really something very special,” said Levy, who has been the cantor at the Israel Center of Conservative Judaism in Fresh Meadows since 1990. “I have never been to Poland, and it will mean a lot to go there. This is something you must do once in your life.”

Nathan Lam, cantor at the Stephen S. Wise Temple in Los Angeles and president of the Cantors Assembly Foundation, is leading the tour and said the trip will connect cantors with the strong history of Jewish music in Poland.

“Poland in 1939 was the center of the cantorial world,” Lam said. “Creativity and artistry of the cantorial music form was at its height. We are returning out of homage and respect to this tradition to which we have dedicated our professional lives.”

Tad Taube, chairman of the Taube Foundation for Jewish Life and Culture, which is sponsoring the tour, said the trip is also meant to highlight a revival of Jewish life and culture in Poland.

Poland was once home to the largest Jewish population in Europe of around 3.5 million people. More than 3 million Polish Jews died in the Holocaust and many more were forced out after the war. But Polish officials have begun ramping up efforts to attract Jews and Jewish culture back to the country, such as holding the Jewish cultural festival the cantors will attend.

“This trip gives American cantors a unique opportunity to return to where our cantorial musical heritage flourished and to connect with the re-emergence of Jewish life that the new Poland now offers,” Taube said.

Levy, a social studies teacher in Israel before moving to the United States, said his love of music inspired him to begin a second career as a cantor.

“I was born in 1944 and nobody had a piano in their homes,” Levy said. “My home was the first one who bought a piano. I love music.”

August 7, 2009‘There’s work to be done there’ - Cantors reflect on trip to PolandlinkNadine Simpson | Local | World

Poland was never on Cantor Faith Steinsnyder’s “top 10 destinations list.” Nevertheless Steinsnyder, of The Village Temple in Manhattan, was among 70 cantors, including four from Bergen County and hundreds of congregants from synagogues throughout North America, Europe, and Israel, who went on last month’s Cantors Assembly mission “Poland to Israel: A Journey Through Time.”

“It’s important,” said Steinsnyder. “It’s not a fun place to spend your vacation, but it was very moving, very challenging, and very enriching.”

Steinsnyder went on the mission — which visited Poland from June 29 to July 5 and Israel from July 6 to 12 — with her husband, Cantor David Perper, of Beth Haverim Shir Shalom in Mahwah. Unlike many other participants, none of their parents are Holocaust survivors.

But the importance of introducing Jews to today’s Poland was not lost on any of the participants, regardless of the degree to which they were personally affected by the Holocaust.

“The most important thing I learned was the extent to which the current generations of Polish citizens really are a new country because it’s been only 20 years since the fall of communism in Poland,” said Cantor Sam Weiss of the Jewish Community Center in Paramus. “This generation of Polish citizens are discovering their own history, and with that, the Jewish component.”

The Polish attempt to re-create lost Jewish traditions is not an isolated one nor is it only restricted to the few Jews who live in Poland today.

“There are people whose grandparents told them it was more interesting when the Jews were here. You hear that a lot,” said Steinsnyder.

“Even though there are not many Jews, many Poles say ‘When the Jews were here, it was much more rich. We’d really like them back,’” Perper added.

Whether it be the faded wall paintings at Auschwitz by nameless Holocaust victims who most likely perished or the Nosyk Synagogue in Warsaw that has been in use since before the war, there is ample evidence that the Jews made a mark — and left a hole — in society.

Cantor Ilan Mamber of Franklin Lakes, who is affiliated with Temple Beth Rishon in Wyckoff, was moved by the group’s visit to Krakow, in particular the 19th Annual Jewish Music and Culture Festival taking place there.

“There are only 200 Jews there now, but we were in the midst of this festival. Many of the performers were not Jewish, the people who came to this thing which was centered in what used to be the Jewish quarter were not Jewish, yet people flocked to it. A lot of music was Yiddish or based on it,” he said.

He found Saturday night of the Jewish Music Festival especially meaningful. The male cantors came to the stage and performed a 15-minute Havdalah service for the spectators.

“There were 15,000 people there, most of whom were not Jewish, but they were listening to us and they were awed,” Mamber said.

While this was a highlight of the trip for many, it was one of several performances in which Steinsnyder and the other female cantors could not participate because the majority of Poland’s Jews are strictly observant.

“When they see us, they want us to be like the Jews of old time, completely Orthodox and male-dominated,” Steinsnyder said. “There were moments in this historic trip that were men-only, which had a curious effect on the women in this group, because it’s tough to be disenfranchised just for the sake of making a historical event,” she said.

Still, the women were able to participate in some of the pinnacle performances of the trip, including a weekday morning service at Auschwitz, a concert at the Opera House, and a show at the Yiddish Theater in Warsaw. The Yiddish Theater was Steinsnyder’s favorite.

“To perform in the Yiddish Theater was insane. Now, I can get all emotional about it, but at the time I had to concentrate on remembering my lines. The show went well; I wish we could’ve done it again,” she said. (The cantors’ concert drew from musical theater, Yiddish theater, and American songs by Jewish composers.)

“The thrill for me, in getting to know about Polish culture, was being able to sing in the opera house with the choir and orchestra. It really was and has been a cultural center for so long. To be on that opera stage and the next day on the Yiddish Theater stage, that was intense.”

But in the midst of uplifting performances to celebrate the continuing existence of a vibrant Jewish culture, the group took the time to pay respect to the Jewish victims of the Holocaust by visiting Auschwitz and Birkenau. “Doing a simple morning, weekday service at Auschwitz was very powerful,” Mamber said. One of the most moving moments was after we read the Torah. There were 70 cantors and 230 congregants from across America. Anyone within the congregants or cantors who was a Holocaust survivor or a relative of a Holocaust survivor, we unfolded the whole Torah and circled around them with it. There’s never been a traditional morning service at Auschwitz,” said Mamber.

The scene in which the cantors led the service eerily reminded the group of where they were.

“There were swallows. I’ve never seen swallows like the swallows at Auschwitz. Black, shrieking birds. It was like a Hitchcock scene,” Steinsnyder said. “There we are, the Jewish people reading Torah, doing our thing, and we were still watched by a guard from Auschwitz.”

The mission, including the Israeli portion, is still vivid for the Bergen County cantors.

“Besides thinking about what we personally got out of it, it’s important to think of what the communities we visited got out of the mission. We were constantly hearing how much our presence was appreciated, both in Poland and in Israel,” said Weiss.

As the cantors return to their home synagogues, they are all planning sermons or temple bulletin articles to share their newfound insight into the Polish people with their congregants.

Steinsnyder, who did not know much about Polish Jewish history before the trip, said that she learned a great deal and hopes that the stories she shares will persuade others to go on similar trips.

“The Poles have photographs and memories [of Jewish life in Poland] but it was three generations ago. Our people invested so much in that land and that area; we’ve got to go back and preserve what we can and see how much there was and what there still is — because there will be a time when people don’t believe it was there,” she said. “It’s a beautiful place, there’s so much of us in their history, and it would just be a shame to abandon that whole part of the world and let whatever evidence is left just go into the ground. You come back from a thing like this with more responsibility. I hope I get back. There’s work to be done there.”

The mission was sponsored by Jewish Heritage Initiative in Poland, founded in 2004 through the Taube Foundation for Jewish Life and Culture. It aims to foster the return of Jewish life and culture to Poland and increase interest in Poland, where many U.S. Jews have roots.

A chance meeting at a concentration camp with a group of Israeli soldiers. The return of two cantors to the synagogue in which their father had been chazzan before the Holocaust. The enthusiastic reception given the cantors by many Poles who were eager to learn about Jewish culture.

Survivors and children of survivors are wrapped in a Torah scroll on the ground of the Auschwitz death camp during the cantors’ tour of Poland earlier this month.

Those were a few of the highlights of a Conservative movement Cantors Assembly mission, "Poland to Israel: A Journey Through Time," by some 70 cantors and several hundred congregants from the U.S., Canada, Europe and Israel. The group included three cantors from the Washington, D.C., area. The trip, which ended in Israel on Sunday and was sponsored by philanthropist Tad Taube and the Taube Foundation for Jewish Life and Culture, is the first of its kind.

At Auschwitz, the cantors davened Shacharit (morning prayer service) between the barracks, said Cantor Sara Geller of B'nai Shalom of Olney.

"I cried when I put on the tallit and tefillin," Geller said. "It was upsetting to be there, but it was comforting to be surrounded by my colleagues."

At the end of the morning Torah reading, the Holocaust survivors and children of survivors in the group -- estimated between 30 and 50 -- came to the front, were wrapped in the opened Torah scroll and then surrounded by the other cantors.

"It was a touching moment, symbolically being embraced by the Torah at Auschwitz," said Jeffrey Weber of Adas Israel Congregation in the District.

Soon, the chazzanim experienced an emotional high when they encountered a group of 100 Israeli soldiers. The symbolic contrast between the death of the Holocaust and the birth of the Jewish state was encapsulated in that moment.

"It was moving to think that those young soldiers were marching with us and to think about the deaths 60 years ago and the celebration of the birth of Israel," said Cantor Abraham Lubin of Congregation Beth El of Montgomery County. The experience was "surreal, the emotions were so strong that we were speechless."

On that same morning, Weber was part of a group of eight cantors who sang "Prayer of the Children" at the very spot in Birkenau where the life-and-death fate of Jews who arrived in the concentration camp was determined by Dr. Josef Mengele's "selection."

"It was an incredible moment," he said.

During the trip, Cantors Ivor Lichterman of Tucson, Ariz., and Joel Lichterman of Denver, Colo., performed in the Nozyk Synagogue in Warsaw where their father, Jakub, had been chazzan before the war.

"They were doing things in a traditional manner, and it was very meaningful for everyone who was there -- cantors, congregants and many local non-Jews," said Weber.

The group also performed at the National Opera House in Warsaw, debuting a work by pop composer Charles Fox based upon the prayers given by Pope John Paul II at the Western Wall.

The cantors' performance at the opera house was sold out, Lubin said.

Geller was especially impressed by the enthusiastic reaction of many Poles. For example, the group appeared at the Krakow Jewish Cultural Festival on July 4, and thousands of Poles listened to the outdoor Havdalah service conducted by some of the cantors.

"There are only about 200 Jews [in Krakow], but there were some 15,000 people there," Weber recalled. "Everyone was dancing in the street and enjoying the music. Almost none of the people were Jewish, but they were reveling in having Jewish culture there. After the Havdalah service, many people were cheering, It was amazing."

Geller found that Poles "are interested in the Jewish people, Jewish culture and the Jewish experience," she said.

Some of this interest is connected to so many Poles discovering in the past 20 years that they have a Jewish connection -- either that they were Jews who were hidden by Christians during the war or that they have Jewish roots, which their parents had kept hidden from them.

Guides, Geller said, told her that if one were to ask Poles why they were so interested in Jewish culture, "they might tell us that life was a lot more rich when Jews lived with us."

Looking back on the trip, it was a matter of "really connecting with our history and our people and what happened during the war," according to Weber. "In Krakow in particular, we were connecting with the 900 years of Jewish history that existed before the war."

Lubin termed the group's trip to Poland a "sacred pilgrimage."

"We went there to pray and, in a sense, be with those who perished [in the Holocaust]," the cantor said.

The visit has changed his recommendations for places Jews should experience. "I always say you must go to Israel and now would add that you must go to Poland, which was a place of death for many Jews," he said, explaining that "by going there, you are creating a link" with the victims of the Holocaust.